I am very much this way. Greenfield dev on a project that's interesting is very engaging. Munging through thousands of lines of code trying to find the conditional or field that isn't being set properly, or that is being incorrectly accessed is draining.

Or finding that `savePaypalTransactionToDatabase` doesn't return the row ID, but instead returns true/false to indicate success, and not being able to easily refactor it because god knows where that function is being used, and what sorts of knock-on effects it can have, even with a decent IDE, and deciding "fuck it, I'll just write a wrapper around it that then queries for the

You know what, nevermind, it's Saturday, why am I thinking about work.

I keep reflecting on this, it's always when you get negative mismatch. Being forced to work with the wrong people (too negative, too angry, not motivated) or not having time to work on a good idea or good solution.

When you don't have to suffer these, you can work long, cause it's basically a kind of self fulfilling game.

The key difference is that you are not working on the same side project doing the same thing for 40 hours a week for years. You probably change around you side project every few months and likely don't work on them full time.